“I am me and my circumstances,” said the famous philosopher to justify himself in front of Mrs. Ortega y Gasset when she returned too cheerful from the tavern. Now Google raises a similar thought: I am me and my contacts in the network.

Google is working on a new system for socializing search results. By progressively launching “Search, plus Your World,” your new personalization system for search engine results, you move a step closer to defining individuals according to their social behaviors. Except that we are a tad more complex than the characters of a Who is who?

Several analyzes arise on this evolution of the search engine. Positioning professionals accelerate the rethinking of their activities in the face of this ongoing merger of SEO and SMO. Emerges the chronic fear that Google, by the dynamics of integration of its services, becomes even more Big Brother. It is also observed that in the framework of its hypothetical fight against Facebook, Google uses its fatal weapon, Search, to impose Google+ as a social tool. As always, a mix of mistrust, clairvoyance and enthusiasm.

In principle, I am clearly in favor of this socialization, and if the goal is to have more personalization and relevance, perfect. What strikes me is not whether Google will have – or already has – too much power or whether it will impose its social network in spite of Facebook, but whether the results I will obtain in my searches, taking into account the “social actions” of my active online contacts, will be relevant.

Personalization has failed

The issue of the relevance of personalized content has already occurred with another Google tool. I often use Google News as the home page. I look at the headlines quickly and sometimes I click on a link if it attracts me. If Google totally personalizes my Google News according to the clicks I make, I will probably have an over representation, do not repeat it, of freekys, of beautiful girls – see how the bold one attracts – or of sport … However, it is not What I want: not to click on the links of politics or international relations does not mean that I do not want to see them.

My theory is that Google voluntarily limits the personalization of the news that appears because it found out that it did not give convincing results. Because, first, my online behavior does not perfectly reflect what I am and what I want, and also because maybe I do not want to be what my online behavior shows that I am. Perhaps Google also does it out of pedagogical sense of responsibility? … well, this would already be a lot of credit to those of Mountain View.

Hi [name], do you know that personalizing is not that easy?

My clicks on Google News can be compared to the actions of the active portion of my contacts. The imperceptible action of reading headlines without clicking resembles the online presence of many of my contacts, passive. Like this large part of the Facebook users that go to your wall, it consumes a lot of content but never leaves posts or comments. Either because he does not dare, he has trouble writing, he does not like to expose himself to the public, because of laziness or for any other reason. The liabilities will be invisible.

Few means still allow a very advanced personalization. The e-mail is one of them, and the day to day of my professional activity in Sarbacán proves it more and more: it is essential to personalize, because it gives incomparable results. Many of our users make great efforts to always qualify their databases, to achieve campaigns with messages as unique as each recipient to which they are directed. Being the designers of the program that allows them to perform this automatic customization, we are spectators of a disconcerting paradox: the result is very powerful, but its root is nothing more than values ​​in the fields of a table. The source of the miracle is the segmentation, which involves putting individuals in boxes, qualifying them systematically. It is efficient, but it has a limit:

So, with the sum of: one, the visibility of active contacts online, and two, the difficulty of defining the human being in variables to know what the user perceives as relevant, it seems to me that the myth of the Social (with the peace & love side of the idea of ​​community) applied to the search will stumble long before adjusting. Which does not imply that this line of work does not have an exciting potential!

On the contrary for example of the personalization of the contents according to the geolocation, that depends on an empirical criterion, to use the human behavior analyzed through its expression in a medium -Internet-, and also not the user but the one of its known assumptions , to provide the appropriate information, is a very ambitious challenge and leaves the question on the air: Does José Otega y Gasset have something to do with the behavior of his active contacts in the network?